Staska.Net

April 23 was one month since I relaunched Staska.Net. It’s a good time to follow my own advice, sit back, look at the results and decide of how to proceed further.

On March 23, before my “Happy birthday John Chow dot Com” post, Staska.Net had 1 post, did not have any visitors, inbound links, Technorati or Alexa ranks.

Last 30 days results:

• No. of Posts: 24
• No. Comments (including trackbacks): 228
• No. of RSS subscribers: 52
• No. of unique visitors: 25 101
• No. Pageviews: 30 625
• daily visitors: ~200
• Alexa rank: 257 484
• Technorati rank: 17 383 (304 links from 220 blogs)
• Google Webmaster Central incoming links: 17 780
• Yahoo Site Explorer inlinks: 5172
• Income: $18.20

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It’s a bit later then some predicted but it’s here. Yesterday I have received an e-mail from Text Link Ads announcing their new program that will allow you to sell text links on your individual blog posts.

So far Text Link Ads have been great and reliable earner for me. And they are really good at selling my text links even on the blogs I did not update for more then 6 months. One such blog has had 2 links sold for $11 a month for the last 3 months (about $60 in profits by now). And it’s only PR4 site with 7 posts and 2-3 pageviews a day.

The only problem I had with Text Link Ads - my inventory on a best performing blog has sold out last month. And they do not give a lot of options to add additional inventory from the same site.

E.g. I have quite a few category pages with PR4 that might be interesting for advertisers. I have a few posts that have been Dugg and received tons of backlinks from lots of trusted sites, as a result. And I have a lot of posts that were linked by Engadget, Gizmodo and some other PR8 or PR7 sites.

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March 2007 was a great month for small online earners/publishers, if we are talking about blog monetization opportunities.

5 new blog monetization programs opened for them and they are not from some third tier ad networks offering to test some shady monetization schemes. All of them come from well known players in the industry and look really promising:

Chitika RPU ad units came out of limited beta and are now available to all Chitika publishers. I have been using Chitika RPU since January and it almost doubled my blog income overnight. If you look at my earnings results for Chitika this year, I would say that 70-80% of income was generated by just this one ad unit.

Auction ads is a program owned by ShoeMoney and MediaWhiz Holdings, the company behind Text Link Ads and ReviewMe. Auction ads is a CPA program that serves the ads for various eBay auctions to your blog. You enter the keywords for which you want to have auctions displayed, or even make ads contextual and get paid when someone registers for EBay service or completes an auction.

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January was the first month that I resumed my active blogging and moved into online money making activities fulltime. Although my online earnings remained more or less constant at $300/month through second half of 2006, with my blogs lying dormant the traffic was dropping fast and Christmas out of the way, earnings were heading that way too.

I dusted off two of my main blogs and started posting there, averaging 4-6 posts a day. In the beginning things moved rather slowly and during the first two weeks of January I made $110.

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Content monetization options for your blog keep getting better and better. Just yesterday John Chow opened Kontera Inline Content Ads for us and today I see an invitation to join Amazon Associates Context Links Beta.

Amazon Associates Context Links Beta is a program very similar to Kontera Inline Link Ads - it searches your pages for the relevant keywords and then transforms these keywords into product links. When user mouses over the link, a box with the relevant product ad appears:

When user clicks on the ad, he is taken to the Amazon Product Page. If he buys the product, you get affiliate commission.

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If you have a tech/gadget related site and are running only AdSense on it, you are leaving a lot of money on the table. And you probably already know that, since everyone writing about how to make money online is telling you this. But it doesn’t make it any less true. By putting just one new ad unit I almost doubled my blog income overnight.

To supplement my blog income I have been running another CPC network - Chitika - ads for more then a year now. And the income from it never amounted to much and was certainly not comparable to what AdSense was generating. Until this January. When Chitika started earning almost the same amount of money as AdSense, which effectively doubled my blog income.

What happened? Well, Chitika introduced a new ad format, called “Related products unit” (RPU). It looks like this:

If you are writing some product related posts, RPU’s are a perfect fit. You put this ad right under your post text, style it with CSS and it doesn’t look like an ad at all. So you get a very good click through rates. For tech products, the CPC of RPU ads are even better then the average CPC I get from AdSense. And when one of my blog posts was dugg, Chitika RPU pulled in two times more then all other ads combined. Read the rest of this entry »

According to Whois, today is seven years since johnchow.com domain was registered. For those who don’t know him, John Chow is a dot com mogul and is probably the newest entrant into Pro Blogging A list. I have been a happy reader of John’s blog for a few month’s now and I think his blogs birthday is a good time to do a review.

John has been actively blogging since December 2005, but until last September his blog was not much different from thousands of personal blogs out there. He liked to write about fast cars, cool gadgets and good meals, give some financial tips and even tried to do some case studies of how to start a new tech site and make money from it.

John started 2006 with 100 visitors a day and a stated goal for his personal blog to:

Make This Blog Into Something Worth Reading

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